The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her. She wouldn’t miss your wedding,” Griffiths’s sister, Melissa, assured her. But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding reception, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes. On hearing the news she collapsed, hit her head on a table and blacked out. Paramedics pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.”

For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister” was one in a series of upheavals stretching across a decade. It began with the death of her mother, who was her greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic. She had instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above everything. I was raised not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men.”

In 2017, Griffiths met and fell in love with Rushdie at a literary gathering, where he had collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open, leaving him with a bloody head and a bruised ego. After that came the pandemic, during which two of Griffiths’s uncles died.

But there was worse to come. Less than a year after Moon’s death, a stranger attempted to assassinate Rushdie. The author, who had a fatwa issued against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, sustained near fatal stab wounds to his neck, chest, hand and eye. Rushdie would later write about the attack in his own book, Knife.

The Flower Bearers reflects on these events and more in a narrative that hops back and forth across the decades. It is the first memoir by Griffiths, who has published five volumes of poetry and a novel, Promise. The book is simultaneously a love story, a portrait of sisterhood and a visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation. For Griffiths, the death of her friend and the attempted murder of her husband were “an uncanny Janus coin that [spun] around on the silent, bloodstained earth of my mind”.

As one might expect from an author whose primary medium is poetry, the writing is evocative, full-bodied, perhaps a little overcooked in parts. Griffiths is a serious soul acutely attuned to the subtleties of human interactions and the chaos of her interior world. Though she skates over some troubling aspects of her story – there is passing mention of sexual violence and a serious suicide attempt in her early 20s – she is expansive and moving on her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. Griffiths’s struggles with the mental health condition led to her calling a suicide hotline in 2013. Unbeknown to her, the police were notified and dispatched to her Brooklyn apartment, where they demanded entry. Once in, they forced her to the floor and handcuffed her, ignoring her requests to walk with them to the waiting ambulance. “I hadn’t been arrested for any crime, yet my mental health episode had criminalised me,” she reflects.

The Flower Bearers goes to some dark places, but there is joy, too, most notably in its portrait of Griffiths’s and Moon’s friendship, which brims with tenderness. The pair met in New York when they were graduate students studying creative writing in the mid-2000s, working multiple jobs and living hand-to-mouth. Their connection was cemented by music, poetry and the challenges of being Black women making their way in the world. Both felt “safe to share who we were, who we were becoming and what from our pasts was keeping us from claiming the promises of our futures”.

In the final chapters, Griffiths embarks on a trip to the American south to honour Moon and the writers who inspired them both, and to confront the grief that threatens to overwhelm her. In doing so, she learns to accept loss as a part of living. “I know that life demands deaths, and births, each day. But it also insists on singing, dancing, suffering, surviving and loving. There is a last hour ahead of me somewhere, and it will be mine too, intimate as my first breath.”

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.comIn the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 1. Delivery charges may apply.

Newcastle-born Eliza Clark, 30, went viral on TikTok with her 2020 debut novel, Boy Parts, a violent, darkly comic thriller with a fetish photographer for an antiheroine, published by indie press Influx. By 2023 she was a scrappy outsider no longer, having moved to Faber with a second novel (Penance, presented as a true-crime story of a murder among teenagers) and scored a place on Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of 20 best fiction writers under 40. Now comes her first short story collection, She’s Always Hungry, a firecracker of a book that blends horror with speculative fiction and fantasy as it delves into themes of gender and power. She lives in south-east London.

What appeals to you about the short story?
It’s a little self-contained thing. It’s nice to give yourself space to experiment with different stuff – to have a bunch of ideas that you can explore and a bunch of worlds that you can play with. This has been the most fun I’ve had with a project because so much of it was so old, it didn’t even feel as if I’d written it. I could dramatically change and improve it, which is really satisfying.

Where do you find your inspiration?
The title story [about a boy in a matriarchal fishing village who catches and keeps a mermaid-like “finwife”] was inspired by a chapter in Killing for Company, the Brian Masters book about Dennis Nilsen, where he talks about the culture of the fishing villages in Aberdeenshire that Nilsen grew up in, and I’d wanted to do something with the idea of having this mythical creature and keeping it. That comes in part from a couple of Japanese films, Marebito by Takashi Shimizu, and Hideshi Hino’s Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole. The creature is often quite submissive, and I was interested in changing that.

Tell me about the decision to include content warnings. Neither of your previous books carried them, right?
No, and I felt a bit – not bad about it, but when I get tagged in a review, people generally say: “You should really check content warnings on this one.” I think there’s a lot of value in them, but they can be quite spoiler-y which is why they’re at the back.

Parasitic infestations, cannibalism and “pustules and rot” are all listed. Do you have any rules when you’re writing the gory bits?
I recently saw The Substance. The last half-hour is really heavy on prosthetic effects, and I was like, wow, I wish every film ended like this. When I’m writing about that stuff I guess I’m thinking about films that I like, which is actually not a very good thing because it can lead to quite bad prose, but I try to have a light hand and keep descriptions short and effective.

How do you feel about the collection being marketed as horror?
I can already tell that there are going to be loads of people who pick this up expecting it to just be horror from start to finish. I would definitely like to work more in horror – I’m so influenced by it but feel I’d struggle not to pollute it with something else.

What are some of the positive and negative aspects of being a writer today?
It can be a lot easier to find a niche and an audience but I often struggle with the signing table. I’m not very good with eye contact and being on best behaviour. I sometimes feel really jealous of writers who were working before the “you’re shit and I hate you” era of social media, too.

Is it worse for young women?
Definitely. There’s also the classic thing of a young man publishing his debut novel and there’s this immediate attempt to shove it into a canon – it’s just like Kerouac or Bukowski. Whereas when you’re a young woman, you’re compared to this other woman that had this book published six months ago. Career-wise, I’m looking forward to being an older writer.

Are things getting any better?
I feel like we genuinely are publishing more young female writers, I just don’t think we’re respecting them. When they announced the Granta list, a male journalist wrote this incredibly effusive paragraph – paragraph – about Graeme Armstrong. I’m not saying Graeme Armstrong doesn’t deserve a whole paragraph, but Sophie Mackintosh got two sentences, and then below that, “more in this vein with Eliza Clark, Lauren Aimee Curtis and Camilla Grudova”. I’d never felt so profoundly disrespected in my career, particularly because that vein is so broad. It felt so flagrantly sexist and reductive.

Did you write as a child?
In school I would always write pages and pages and pages, and then be sent home with my own exercise book to write stories in. I never really did – it’s difficult to keep up a sustained writing practice when you’re eight – but at 13 or 14, I started writing fan fiction, and with an audience became super-prolific.

Do you have a writing routine?
I don’t sleep very well and the idea of me doing work before midday is very unlikely but I’m quite happy to sit and work until two o’clock in the morning. Sometimes when I see the way other people talk about writing I think, why do you do it? It doesn’t sound like you’re having fun. I wouldn’t write if it wasn’t my favourite thing to do.

What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on a third novel for nearly two years, kind of in a speculative space. There’s definitely a version that’s very commercial, that could do really well, and there’s definitely quite an off-putting version. It’s been interesting thinking, what do I want to do with this?

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Who are your literary influences?
My first favourite author and one of my most influential is Stephen King. That was what I cut my teeth on.

What have you read lately that you’d recommend?
Negative Space by BR Yeager, an independently published horror novel. It was so, so good – like, here’s what you can do with a novel. Also, The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, which I couldn’t believe I hadn’t read before. It’s one of those books that feels like it should have been super-foundational. If you’re stuck with reading, I recommend The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. It’s published everywhere else as The City and the Dogs, which is a much better title.

What’s next on your reading pile?
I’ve been quite bad for bouncing around a bunch of authors and not focusing on one to get a better sense of their whole oeuvre, so I’m going to read more Dennis Cooper. I could do with reading more Ursula K Le Guin as well. I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year and found it revolutionary.

How do you arrange your books?
Our shelves are colour-coded, which I always feel deeply embarrassed about. When we moved into our flat my partner was like, “Shall we colour code our books?” And I said no. It does actually look really nice but it’s a nightmare to find anything.